Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  He hadn’t actually thought that Teazle would arrive for at least another day and felt annoyed that he’d spent so long lying and freezing in a cold garage before announcing himself. For reasons that largely escaped him he felt it was important the three of them did not experience any conflict that might lead to separations. The conviction bothered him. Zal wasn’t possessive but now he found himself the unexpected arbiter of their relations and peacemaker wasn’t his forte. Troublemaker used to sit much more easily on him, but that was before Jack Giantkiller had slammed the life out of him on the bank of the frozen dead lake with his floating dead friends inside it.

  He moved to the comfort of the sunny grass, newly vacated, and waited for the others to come and sit down there before lying down with his head in Teazle’s lap. He found the demon’s tail with one hand and pulled it around and over himself like a blanket.

  The chiselled, handsome face bent over him, speaking Demonic so that nobody could understand whom he didn’t wish to overhear. Their aethereal bodies teased each other with a sensation like popping candy just under the skin. Teazle’s tone was affectionately mocking, ‘Do you feel safe now?’

  Zal ignored him and closed his eyes. ‘Don’t move around too much. I’m tired.’

  ‘You smell of each other,’ the demon said.

  Lila moved up to Teazle’s other side and they found a position where they leaned on each other, heads close together. Their conversation covered a lot of what he’d talked about before but there was a hesitancy about Teazle that was interesting. It only confirmed what Zal had already seen. Teazle was in love with her. Whether the demon knew it hardly mattered. He knew that Lila wasn’t conscious of the fact and wondered if it was going to lie dormant until some moment of crisis when it would ambush one of them and get someone killed. He probably should have left them alone together, he thought, but then again he actually found Teazle’s lap comforting of all things and Zal was bad at denying himself anything these days, especially something new and curious. Not that he’d ever been remotely good at it.

  It didn’t even occur to him who else might notice.

  The elf who had served them before returned and gave a half bow, her eyes fixed on Teazle and steely with self-control. ‘I must ask you to leave. Our guests consider this a place of refuge and you are severely disrupting the aether.’ She spoke in beautifully precise Otopian as a clear deference to Lila but her discomfort and hostility was palpable.

  Lila opened her mouth but Teazle beat her to it. He spoke elvish like it was a blade weaving in the air between them. ‘And if I do not?’

  ‘Cut it out,’ Lila said sharply, placing her hand on his knee at the same time. His head inclined towards her and she felt him relax slightly. ‘How about we stay long enough to finish what we ordered and then go quietly?’

  The waitress composed her lips in a line and then said, ‘That might be possible if he would contain his aura as long as he is in here.’ She looked as though she had a terrible taste in her mouth.

  Teazle turned his gaze back to her, baleful, but the tension lessened and Lila figured he must have done whatever he was asked because she started to hear voices again and then the movement of the other customers slowly creeping out of hiding. The woman hesitated.

  ‘Thank you,’ she still hesitated, looking at Teazle as if she were watching something repellent but unusually fascinating. ‘You . . .’

  ‘Get lost,’ Teazle said in Otopian but with absolute finality. She departed although, Lila was glad to see, she didn’t actually run. Under her hand Teazle’s body was solid as stone, temperature rising in reaction to his temper. ‘Elves,’ he snarled, back in Demonic again, every ounce of contempt rendered so deeply in the utterance that she smiled – no other language had the ability to enhance the world with its speaker’s feelings in quite the same way. For a split second she saw every elf in her field of vision transformed into a strangely loathsome colour, all except for Zal.

  ‘Familiarity hasn’t softened your opinion then?’ she said, seeing him look down at her hand with the intensity that used to both scare and excite her. It did so now although she tried to suppress it, and the memories of their unions in months past. She felt abruptly angry with herself for being embarrassed, for being an idiot, for talking foolishly to cover up in front of him. In front of Zal.

  Teazle glanced down at Zal’s head. ‘He and they are not of one kind,’ was all he said finally. There was an undercurrent of darkness in the statement she found she didn’t like. Then that juggernaut attention turned itself on her with full force. ‘You are ashamed of your liking for me.’

  She should have known nothing would get past him.

  ‘I’m ashamed of myself,’ she corrected, trying to find the words that would explain even though she didn’t understand it, but he shook his head fractionally and put his hand on hers, gripping it tightly enough to hurt. She felt the balance of power between them tipping away from her inexorably and cursed herself for her stupidity. She hadn’t been expecting him and she wasn’t ready. She realised that she was afraid of him. This was what added such spice to their relationship, although now she saw the fact clearly it appalled her but didn’t stop her breath coming faster as he gently moved his own head closer to hers and very, very gently rubbed his cheek against her own. His breath was soft over her lips as he murmured affectionate nonsense syllables to her.

  She might as well have been cuddling up to a tiger but there was such a thrill to his interest in her that she couldn’t resist. She kissed him, almost without meaning to, at the side of his lips and saw him looking down at Zal with a strange, fixated expression. Then his diamond clear eyes flicked towards her and it was gone.

  ‘I have a favour I must ask,’ he said in Demonic very quietly and straightened his back. ‘Since we have come back from Faery all of us have been altered but I am still changing,’ he said finally. ‘I want you to see if there is anything you can detect – if you are able to know what is happening. I went to see a necromancer who wouldn’t speak to me about it and now won’t be speaking about anything any more, and a shaman who told me something unbelievable.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The moment of his trust was so surprising that it touched her deeply. She tried to cover for both of them by the first thing she could say. ‘I can try. But you’re so very aetheric. I doubt I could identify what something was even if I could see it.’

  ‘No,’ he said and she knew that she was the only one he trusted enough to show the depth of this vulnerability to. ‘Do it. Look. As you can. Look everywhere.’

  Tenderness made her nod gently at him, showing her sympathy, but he shot her a look that was a warning and then Zal quietly dug him in the back of the knee and the moment in which she had seen a killing light rise in his face passed. Confusion filled her, and a touch of new fear. She was falling foul of that demon domination thing, she knew. She’d done it when he had exposed a weakness and she had sympathised, thus agreeing to notice it. But even so, to find that look heading in her direction was a shock. She stumbled over her words. ‘Sure. Of course I’ll try.’

  ‘Now?’ he murmured, so softly she barely heard him, and his tone was a command.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lila activated all her sensors. She realised there could be no real love between her and Teazle, because all her care would be a weakness his nature could only exploit. She felt a feeling she was used to – despair – and wearily pushed it aside.

  He started when she gave a slight laugh. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well that can’t be right,’ she said dismissively, checking and rechecking the data. She was using the graphs and charts from a demon aethero-medical resource, testing readings against their collection of averaged scores on every kind of material manifestation. Their zeal for excess meant there was no parameter left unmeasured with regard to the makeup of any kind of demon. ‘I think . . . I think I have to check that with an expert. I’ll go to Bathshebat and—’

  ‘Tell me!’ he hissed and his hand was ge
tting stronger on hers again. ‘If you have any idea I want to hear it, I don’t care what you think of it.’

  ‘All right.’ She wrenched her hand back with just as much violence as it took and looked him in the eye. She was surprised at how much of a shock it was to her human expectations to feel that she saw right through into his soul every time she did this. Humans said poetically that the eyes were the windows to the soul, but with demons it was absolutely true and also that their soul was capable of staring right back into yours with a deadly accuracy no human vision really ever managed. It was why they had never had any time for lies. Once, looking at Teazle had been like looking at a snowfield or an arctic whiteout. The colour was supersaturated. Over the last year however, he had started to shine and take on a quality she could only describe to herself as translucent. She felt his apprehension and his hatred of how much this was weakening his basic ability to dominate everyone in his path. She saw his self-loathing and he saw hers. With difficulty she assembled her results into words, ignoring it, knowing it wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Your basic vibration sequence, the way that your fundamental particles resonate in the material planes, are mutating from demonic normal activity to . . . something else.’

  He stared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. What?’ she shrugged. ‘I have no idea what.’ She paused and he sat back, deep in thought, frown lines cutting across his high forehead and down between his heavy brows. She said with more venom than she planned, ‘What did that shaman say as he was begging you for mercy?’

  Teazle shot her a dark look. ‘I did not touch him in any way.’ His scowl deepened and even she could feel his mood drop the overall room ambience into a brooding, gloomy pall. ‘He said I was turning into an angel. Not metaphorically. Literally.’

  ‘Death’s angel,’ Lila said, looking at the swords, the faintest veils of light trailing off them, forming spectral wings that vanished into the sunlight. ‘Because those are her swords.’ The idea emptied her mind of anything else. She remembered seeing Teazle as a descending angel when he came with her to the Fleet where they had finally cornered Xaviendra, the elf who would be a god. Angels had flown with Xavi at the time and they had been almost unwatchably alien. They had left before the end and not explained themselves and Xavi’s own explanation – that they were there to ensure her safe rise to power – didn’t stand up as far as Lila was concerned. Even so, the notion was ludicrous. It was there and it was impossible. ‘Literally.’

  Teazle growled, ‘So he said.’

  On Teazle’s lap Zal made a short sigh although he didn’t speak or open his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know what an angel is,’ Lila said after a second. ‘I mean, outside of books and stories. When Xavi said she had angels escorting her I thought that she was delusional.’

  ‘She is, and they’re The Others,’ Zal said then, coughing to clear his throat. He still kept his eyes shut and feigned a sleeping pose. ‘Angels are what the rest of us whisper about around the campfire when it’s time for the scary stories. Humans wonder about ghosts and demons. We wonder about angels. And, to a lesser extent, dragons. And spirits. And shadow. We just say Others, because that means all of them and we really don’t know if they’re all different or all the same. They certainly come and go from the same place.’

  ‘They can’t all be the same surely?’ Lila let her AI page through the vast texts on these matters in an offline mode while she stroked Zal’s hair. Later, once she’d slept, she’d wake up and know the contents as if she’d read it properly. Better, in fact, because she’d never been that diligent a student. She let her head come into contact with Teazle’s and then both of them turned to kiss one another for a moment. He was so on edge that he didn’t notice how tense she was in return, or didn’t comment. Lila was taking notes on him now, endless, cold notes: I do this, you do that.

  She asked him, ‘How does it feel?’

  The demon flexed one hand, claws suddenly apparent on his fingertips in a way that happened only when he was readying for a fight. She’d seen them rip through limbs with a seemingly casual swipe. Their edges and tips were diamond sharp and in the tentative Otopian dawn they shone with a wet look. Then, as readily as they’d emerged, they subsided into more of a human nail, blunt and shortened, all the easier to make a fist with. He looked at her for a long moment and she saw him struggling to find any words.

  ‘I feel strange tides,’ he said finally, disappointed with his own pronouncement. ‘Things move unseen beneath.’

  Lila appended it to the casebook she’d opened on him and closed it down. ‘I can track your progress, but I can’t say anything about it. Only give you the facts.’

  At that moment the waitressing elf returned. Lila expected her to ask them to leave but instead, face firmly steeled against their reaction and eyes averted from any direct eye contact, she said, ‘Azrazal Ahriman-Sikarza, someone wishes to speak with you privately.’

  Zal opened his eyes and looked up at her without moving. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  Zal closed his eyes. ‘Then I can’t go. Tell them to come here.’

  Lila scanned the entry records, wondering who was there, but as a private club it didn’t have to reveal its data to her without a warrant even if she had the highest level of clearance, and she didn’t have one. She considered hacking them but that seemed a bit excessive and they’d already strained Zal’s status there to breaking point as it was. She didn’t want to ruin it entirely for him.

  The waitress hesitated and it was clear that she wanted to deliver Zal’s message about as much as she wanted to drink poison, but after a second she turned on her heel and paced away with that elegant stride that made elves seem to glide easily over any ground. Lila found she was glad of the intrusion. Wordlessly Zal reached out and passed her the coffee cup. As she took it she felt his thumb brush the backs of her fingers. Teazle saw it – it was right under his nose – and sighed with a strange softness. She had no idea what to make of this but there was no time to wonder.

  A new figure came drifting towards them, tall and as narrow as an arrow. It wore a green cloak with a large hood that hid its face in a deep shadow. Here and there movements revealed a delicate female body wearing ranger’s clothes in plain materials. An Otopian government-issue Tree-pad was attached to her belt, concealed in a tiny leather satchel. Lila thought you probably couldn’t do much without one of those, hate it as you might, and looked up as the mystery elf’s two long, white hands started to lift themselves towards the hood. With slow exactitude they lifted it and swept it backwards.

  There was nothing that could have prepared her for the sight.

  Lila froze. Zal was suddenly on his feet with no apparent transition from asleep to vertical. His eyes were wide, his expression grim. Only Teazle sat with an expression of mild interest.

  Before them, as large as life and as pretty as Lila remembered her, stood Arie, the Lady of Aparastil, whom she’d last seen disappearing down the gullet of a large dragon in the dark depths of Aparastil Lake.

  It had honestly never occurred to her that anyone other than the humans could become Returners but she supposed that if the dead could be brought back here, they must be able to be brought back anywhere. There seemed no law governing who returned and who didn’t. Perhaps this was spectacularly bad luck. But looking at Arie’s face she didn’t think so. That confident, preening air suggested the same level of calculation was in place that had plotted Zal’s permanent imprisonment and eternal torture and justified it with the survival of Alfheim as the necessary greater good. Because of Arie Lila had stabbed her friend and lover Dar to death. Because of Arie Dar had killed Ilyatath in cold blood. All in the name of survival, but that didn’t make any difference.

  The guilt and horror of that moment, the shame and misery of it, erupted as if it was happening again. Tears filled her eyes and she felt as though she had taken a hammer blow to the solar plexus, so hard that she was forced to cave
in around it, hunching protectively over her heart. She saw Teazle react to her movement with strange understanding dawning in his face. But she never took her eyes off Arie. She wanted to carve that face off. The level of her own hate and how good it promised to make her feel should she act on it was a shock that rendered her motionless so that she lost the initiative.

  Arie ignored her in any case.

  ‘Hello, Zal,’ she said, her golden hair shining, her blue eyes giving him a look as if he were her favourite toy. She shrugged eloquently at his returning gaze, which was slowly moving from stunned emptiness towards wary loathing. Arie smiled, ‘I wager you did not expect to see me again.’

  ‘No,’ Zal said quietly. ‘I hope you put a lot of money on it. What do you want?’

  ‘I thought you might like to know what happened to me after you ruined my efforts to save our world.’ Now she did flick a glance at Lila, as though the effort of ignoring the architect of her downfall had finally proved irresistible. Her loathing and repulsion were unchanged from the first second that she had first seen Lila for what she was – an ignorant human welded badly to an incomprehensible machine. It was an expression that made her beauty ugly in a moment.

  Lila wished she had a mirror but there was no avoiding the ill wish of that stare. Added to the shock of her arrival it lanced other old wounds open she’d thought were long done with. She felt a freak, worthy of spite.

  By her feet Teazle hissed. He was amused and alert, keen with anticipation as he watched them fight.

  Zal did something with his hand, some arcane gesture that flicked Arie’s attention right back to him and at the same time released Lila from the grip of the sorceress’s intent.

  His voice was a rock star’s disinterested drawl. ‘State your fucking case and be done. I’d be content to see you twice dead.’

  Anger flashed through her green eyes. ‘Very well. I assume you thought the dragon of the lake had eaten me up. And it did, in a way. But a dragon is not a blood and bone creature, some monster of the elements made flesh. I was consumed but I was not destroyed. It kept me in its belly.’